The below advertisement for the San Ysidro Ranch, which I pulled and scanned from an issue of Vanity Fair, presents a few problems.

First, the image itself: If a hotel wanted to cater to an elite class of customers, then why would its marketers want the single graphic representation of the establishment to be a crudely drawn man and woman that don’t even look particularly like travelers? Seriously — look at them. I’d guess their creator was either a somewhat talented six-year-old or an adult artist trying to emulate a child’s drawing style but unwilling to ditch all pretenses of design aesthetic. I’m not one to rip apart kid’s art in the style of “Ding Ding! Here Comes the Shitmobile!”, but I’ll at least say that the graphic doesn’t make much sense, especially for an ad that ran in Vanity Fair.

The there’s the message: The ad is trying to promote the San Ysidro Ranch in a way that suggests the hotel is good despite not being well-known. So why set up the communication of that message by implying that the reader is stupid? The ad asks a question — “Think you know a lot about traveling?” — to which the reader can answer either yes or no. Like a lot of other people who will probably never stay at the San Ysidro Ranch, I answered “no,” but I’d suspect that the hotel itself is more interested in the people who would answer “yes.” And a “yes” sets the reader up for a fall if he or she doesn’t know how to answer the question posed in the next line of text — “Then what was named America’s best hotel by Forbes Traveler?” Really, a person could know tons about traveling and could have never heard of the San Ysidro Ranch. Why tell self-described travel experts actually don’t know all that much, especially since they’d probably be the group most likely to take umbrage to such a slight?

Give people good news — “Hotel you’ve never heard of is surprisingly good and has accolades to prove it!” — and not good news plus an insult — “If you’re so smart, why haven’t you heard about this good hotel, stupid?”

verdigris (VER-di-GREES) — noun: 1. A blue or green powder consisting of basic cupric acetate used as a paint pigment and fungicide. 2. A green patina or crust of copper sulfate or copper chloride formed on copper, brass, and bronze exposed to air or seawater for long periods of time.

Artists might have reason to know the first definition, but anyone who has spent time around old metal stuff should recall seeing the instance of the second definition. I only learned of this word recently, from a post on Bradshaw of the Future that traced the verdigris’s possible connection to the word ooze.

The post also introduced me to the notion that the word’s association with a greenish-gray color is erroneous. Someone with a basic knowledge of French might think that verdigris comes from the French color words vert, “green” and gris, “gray.” And that would be a good guess, too, especially considering that the sound-alike ambergris does, in fact, come the words for “amber” and “gray.” But the word actually comes from the Middle English vertegrez, which in turn descends from the Old French vert-de-Grice, literally “green of Greece.” Feel free to share any ideas about how this particular green became associated with Greece, because it’s apparently not known, at least according to the Online Etymology Dictionary’s entry on the word.

Two penguins are on an iceberg. One had a swimcap, the other had a boombox.

That’s it. If there’s a punch line, I can’t find it.

Figuring this to be a setup somehow deprived of its follow-through, I Googled “penguin swim cap boom box joke”. Nothing. Then I tried “One had a swimcap, the other had a boombox” and got a few pages of joke websites listing the same joke. All did so with swimcap instead of the more standard swim cap, so it’s probable that they all just copied each other’s jokes, including this one, whose original, erroneous posting on some site has now been preserved for eternity.

That’s the only explanation I can think of, because I otherwise do not understand this joke. Anyone? Is this funny? Does it even make sense?

Friday, May 29, 2009

The schemes of con man Stephen Bloom are elaborately constructed — “like Russians write novels, full of story arcs and symbolism” — and deliver the kind of ending that satisfies everyone involved. Writer-director Rian Johnson clearly identifies with the character: Stephen’s sentiments are but one of the many ways in which Johnson establishes a parallel between films themselves and the intricate con at the center of The Brothers Bloom. The metaphor he builds will give the analytically-minded much to consider once the end credits roll — but it doesn’t hurt that the film’s well-plotted globetrotting adventure is a delight to watch that features a satisfying resolution, both for its characters and its audiences.

The Brothers Bloom focuses on the attempts of the younger titular sibling (Adrian Brody) to leave the con game — attempts which are complicated by the demands of older brother and partner-in-crime Stephen (Mark Ruffalo). The inevitable “final job”: bilking a fortune out of wealthy recluse Penelope (Rachel Weisz). Of course, it’s never that easy — but what could have been a hackneyed storyline evolves into an original screwball comedy with a film noir heart. Despite quirkiness, that heart beats with real emotion. As good cinematic con men should, Brody and Ruffalo sell their brotherly bond, while Weisz’s performance places Penelope at the film’s tumultuous emotional center. Creative mastermind Johnson is just as deserving of accolades — not only for avoiding a sophomore slump following his 2005 debut, Brick, but also for treating audiences to a fun film that doesn’t underestimate their intelligence.

I could probably write a lot on the Bone Suckin’ Sauce brand of barbecue sauce.

However, I think the gist of it is that I can’t decide whether this is the best name ever or worst name ever for a food product. So what do we think? Did the people who name this know what they were doing? Or are they just innocent?

Thursday, May 28, 2009

A Back of the Cereal Box field reporter sent in the following image, taken at the UCSB arts library. It’s with no small amount of amusement that we should note that the nineteenth volume of the Dictionary of Art spans all entries between “leather” and “macho.”

I would joke that this book contains leather, macho and everything in between, but the cruel rules of alphabetical order dictate that the entry on Mapplethorpe would most like be in volume twenty.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Britney Spears is shooting a video today and tomorrow here in Santa Barbara. And, by that, I mean to say that Britney Spears is rhythmically bending over in front of a camera and some people are standing around her, pretending to act. Interested? Check out the casting call, via Craigslist.

Please submit a current headshot and contact info to be considered for this role. Submissions without a picture will not be considered.

Character Descriptions

COUNTRY CLUB MEMBERS: Age 35-60- Male or Female-All Ethnicity- looking for a refined mixture of people with a prestigious/ wealthy appearance. Must be in the Santa Barbara area or willing to travel shoot.

SOCIALITES: Age 21-30-Male or Female-Caucasian- Beautiful young men and women, who look prestigious and wealthy. Must be in the Santa Barbara area or willing to travel shoot.

Shoot/Call Date: 5/27/09 and 5/28/09

Location: Santa Barbara, CA

Pay Rate: $150+ 20%

I don’t know what to think of the fact that the wealthy older people can be any ethnicity but the beautiful, prestigious socialites must be Caucasian.

Upon not successfully unplugging the drain, hurt foot by kicking bathtub and shout misogynist swear word for no clear reason.

Slam the plunger down on the drain, neglecting to properly forming a seal, repeatedly thrust up and down in a frenzied action that clearly benefits the amateur plumber more than it does the apparently professional drain clog. End result: dirty tub water gets everywhere.

Dina gave me something that I’m now happily regifting to you all: footage of the jerboa doing its thing.

The thing it does, of course, is bringing joy to the world through bird-like hopping. Not to be confused with such similar species as the Kangaroo rat, Australian hopping mice, and some crime-against-nature offspring born from the drunken mating of a titmouse and a dormouse, the jerboa is native to regions of between northern Africa and central Asia. The above one, who hops to a soundtrack that seems to have been taken from a video game, hails from Africa, while the below one is a pygmy jerboa and therefore comes from temperate Asian deserts.

Both specimens glimpsed in these videos, however, seem to live in sterile, lab-like environments. Maybe they’re adapting.

Bonus points for the second one: It falls off its pedestal about 32 seconds into the clip.

Monday, May 25, 2009

I received a letter at work. This letter had undergone two experiences that most don’t: being partially destroyed, possibly through the intervention of an angry dog or toddler, and then being encased in a plastic sleeve.

The evidence:

The back of the evidence:

I don’t know what amuses me more: the decision to protect the letters that have already been partially torn open, the giant block letters reading “WE CARE” at the top of the standard issue apology message, or the fact that it leaves a space for a postmaster signature that, at least in this case, remained blank.

To cut to the chase, I’ll just say now that The Brothers Bloom made good on my months and months of expectations. I’ve been following production of Rian Johnson’s follow-up to Brick since quite literally the day after I saw Brick and I can happily report that Johnson did not suffer a sophomore slump. I’m actually writing a review for paper later today, but I’m first posting here some odds and ends that most likely will not make the final cut for the in-print article, even though they may well prove to be more interesting than the review itself.

I’d advise you to avoid the text that follows if you haven’t yet seen The Brothers Bloom — and you should seeThe Brothers Bloom — because my tidbits give some major plot points away. I’ve only seen the film once, and since I feel like this might be one of those that improves upon multiple viewings, it may well turn out that some of what I’m laying down in the following points is actually rubbish. However, what follows at least what’s bouncing around in my head.

Foremost, I left the theater unclear as to whether Penelope (Rachel Weisz) is a real girl or if she is actually a “character” in some massive con constructed by Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) in hopes of ensuring his brother, Bloom (Adrien Brody), the happy ending that he claims such a production should provide. In the end, I don’t think Penelope is a fake — and I don’t want to think that she’s a fake — but I wouldn’t put it past Johnson to have written the character so that she appears to be this way. I’ve never read whether he did so intentionally, but I know quite a few people watched Brick and left thinking that the character The Brain could have actually been a figment of the main character’s imagination or possibly a manifestation of his deductive mind whose seeming physical presence gave the protagonist a means of working out the film’s mystery without doing so completely inside his own head. The theory about The Brain, or at least how it’s explained to me, doesn’t hold much water and is probably more a result of directorial design. Similarly, neither do any Penelope-as-plant theories, but they’re still interesting to consider.

My evidence for Penelope possibly being less-than-genuine include the following:

At one point, Bloom describes Penelope as reminding him of a character Stephen would have written. While the film never focused on the myriad incidental characters Stephen famously writes into his cons, Penelope would seem to neatly fit in: Her being a recluse conveniently precludes her having any associates outside of what is offered in the span of the film’s central caper. And the one thing tying her to a life outside her experience with Bloom and Stephen — her mansion in New Jersey — is conveniently exploded into nonexistence two-thirds of the way through the film. It’s all very neat, but then again, these very reasons make her an ideal mark.

The audience never finds out how Penelope talked the Czech police into not arresting her in Prague. Bloom mentions this, and Stephen curiously suggests that it’s more satisfying not knowing. This bit comes off as a joke, but it’s nonetheless suspicious.

The end of the film makes a point of showing off Stephen’s blood on Bloom’s shirt. As it’s pointed out earlier in the film, real blood turns brown in about thirty minutes; costume blood stays bright red. When Penelope initially looks at Bloom’s shirt, the blood is red. Later, after Bloom has fallen asleep and then awakened, the blood is brown, which would seem to indicate that Stephen truly did die. However, the way this information is presented allows for the argument that this too is staged — specifically by Penelope while Bloom was unconscious. This line of thought falls apart upon close inspection — how, exactly, would she have switched a shirt Bloom was wearing or somehow turned the fake blood brown? — but the ambiguity is there, if only for a fleeting moment.

Despite these points in favor of Penelope having been created and constructed by Stephen, there’s significant arguments against this being the case. Most obviously, Stephen really seems to be dead at the end of the film. The car bomb that supposedly killed Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi)? Probably not what it seems. No body. Stephen? Pretty damn dead. Also, when Penelope sneaks into the castle in Prague, she’s out of Bloom’s sight but still acts like a scared-shitless innocent — not a plant who had been coached to perform a role.

The film maps certain tropes of drama onto those of the confidence game — and with good reason. Just as Stephen claims that a good con gives everyone what they want in the end, so too does a good play or movie. In many ways, Stephen’s cons work more like elaborate performance art or interactive theater than what typical con men do. Bloom himself notes that Stephen constructs cons “like Russians write novels,” or something to that effect. In this sense, Stephen is actor and director — and isn’t it a stereotype that every actor ultimately wants to direct? It’s particularly fitting that the film’s second-to-last major scene takes place in a run-down theater. It’s the end for Stephen, nearly the end of the movie and probably the last drama to unfold in that particular playhouse, which looks like it’s going to fall over at any moment. The fact that Stephen literally dies on stage would seem like good evidence for anyone trying to prove that this big kill is fake, but I don’t think this is the case. I’m pretty sure Johnson wanted us to think of Stephen as very much so dunzo, with the fact that his final moments occur in a theater being symbolic and not a hint about something secretive.

The names of the title characters are assigned rather strangely. Whereas the elder Bloom Brother gets a regular first name, the younger one is only addressed as Bloom. Unless his name is Bloom Bloom — which wouldn’t be inappropriate, given the handful of ways the film reminded me of Pushing Daisies — his first name is simply never uttered and not listed in the credits. It’s not unheard of that this would be the case. (For example, the “I” in Withnail and I is never named in the film.) But if Bloom is actually Adrien Brody’s character’s first name, then this film’s brother-brother pair would be the only one besides the Mario Bros. to have a first name arbitrarily applied to both in the way a last name usually would. An online contest was apparently held to give the younger Bloom a first name — or at least so says this article, which, curiously, was written by someone named Dan Bloom — but there’s no indication of what the results of that contest were.

Speaking of names, the pairing of the names Bloom and Penelope made me think of the marrieds in Joyce’s Ulysses, even if the female half of that pair is actually named Molly. The book’s final chapter — Molly’s chapter, arguably — is titled “Penelope.”

An alternate name Stephen makes up for Bang Bang is something like Yen-Ling or Yeng-Ling or maybe even Yuengling. If it’s the third, it would be a name shared by the popular East Coast beer brand. Penelope herself event points this similarity out. Nothing too notable here — just me feeling validated because I’ve always thought Yuengling sounded like a Chinese name. It’s not, but then again Bang Bang isn’t Chinese either.

Bloom guesses that Bang Bang only knows three words of English, if I remember correctly. That’s also how many she speaks in the entire movie: She says “Campari” when ordering a drink and “Fuck me” when she realizes her role in a particular scheme will not turn out how she planned it to. Sure, she sings in English later at a Tokyo karaoke bar, but she was reading from words on the screen then.

Also, unless I’m mistaken, Rinko Kikuchi’s roles in English movies so far consist of her playing a deaf girl in Babel and now playing what is essentially a mute in The Brothers Bloom.

I’m not sure what to make of Bang Bang’s use of Barbie dolls — or, perhaps more accurately, Barbie-like dolls — as shells for blasting matter. One could argue that despite the fact that she exists in a noirish world, she’s literally exploding female stereotypes. For one, she’s an explosive expert, for one. For another, she mostly communicates physically, yet doesn’t use her sexuality as a weapon or tool. That a woman named Bang Bang would function fairly independently of her gender seems pretty damn notable..

Considering the film’s noirish leanings, it actually seems rather strange that it contains no real femme fatales. Brick contained three, depending on how you look at them: Meagan Good and Emilie de Ravin’s characters both exhibit some femme fatale-like qualities, and then there’s Nora Zehetner’s character, a true femme fatale and also the fim’s big bad. It seems especially appropriate, then, that Zehetner would appear in the opening few minutes of The Brothers Bloom as a woman who tries to seduce Bloom and is coldly rejected by him, never to be seen again.

Johnson has noted that the anime series Cowboy Bebop was an aesthetic influence on Brick. And Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character bears a strong physical similarity to Bebop’s main guy, Spike Spiegel. I’d argue that Cowboy Bebop is a palpable influence on The Brothers Bloom too, what with the capering and the four-person schemes. But I’d also suggest ’70s anime series Lupin III as well — in part because Spiegel and Lupin share a number of physical similarities and in part because The Brothers Bloom’s madcap crime schemes seem more like those that would be attempted by Lupin’s four-person team. And as does any good anime, The Brothers Bloom includes a ballad — even if it’s sung at a karaoke bar instead of over the end credits.

On the subject of the lack of supporting players in the film’s central con, it seems especially notable that the film has such a small cast — there’s only really seven characters to speak of — when, again, Stephen is known for such massive productions that the one that ends at beginning of the film has a cast party.

Considering how much I’ve written that can’t fit into the 250 words I have to fit my review, I can only assume that the final product will be an abysmal failure. It should be clear, however, that I thoroughly liked the movie, to the point that I wouldn’t even feel that it would be cheap to spin a sequel out of it — Mr. and Mrs. Bloom, maybe, with Brody and Weisz playing a latter-day, larceny-bent Nick and Nora Charles. Of course, maybe that’s actually a terrible idea. And maybe that’s one more thing I won’t mention in the pending review.

On Friday night, the DVD finished and the TV went to what it had been displaying earlier that day: The Game Show Network. In fact, we happened to be just in time for an episode of Allen Ludden-era Password featuring Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched and Jim Backus, a.k.a. Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island. I’d guess the date of the show at around 1966 or so. It was also standard retro-game show stuff until one of the later rounds introduced a word that I didn’t expect to be uttered on TV back in the day.

Yes, the password was vibrator, which apparently meant something different than it does now, as it elicited nary a snigger from anyone on stage or in the audience. Spencer guessed the sense of the word referred to a vibrating beltweight loss device, though I actually have no idea for sure what what definition these people would have been familiar with.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Unexpectedly, given the quirkiness inherent in a letter that leads off such great words as ungulate and ululation and which has been enabling that most unusual letter, “Q,” for centuries, I couldn’t find “U” words that seemed particularly deserving of being this week’s word-of-the-week. Maybe because I just learned that Transylvania literally means “beyond the forest” (from the Latin ultra silvam, though some put the etymology at trans silvam, “across the forest”), I eventually gave into a word that meant something similar.

ultramontane (UL-tra-MON-tayn or UL-tra-mon-TAYN) — adjective: 1. Of or relating to peoples or regions lying beyond the mountains, especially the Alps. 2. When referring to the Roman Catholic Church a. Supporting the authority of the papal court over national or diocesan authority. b. Relating to or supporting the doctrine of papal supremacy. noun: 1. One who lives beyond the mountains, especially south of the Alps.

Normally, I use this space below the dictionary definition to blather on, but the book in which I found this particular word, Peter Bowler’s The Superior Person’s Book of Words, does such a good job explaining it and its eccentricities that I’ll just relay what it says:

Formerly, [ultramontane referred to] that faction within in the Catholic Church which either lived north of the Alps, outside of Italy, and opposed the concept of papal supremacy, or lived south of the Alps, within Italy, and favored the concept of papal supremacy. Nowadays, more commonly used simply to mean situated beyond the mountains. As, for example, Palm Springs. Not to be confused with ultramundane, which means beyond the realities of earthly existence; unreal, unworldly. As, for example, Palm Springs. Not to be confused, also, with ultra-mundane (with a hyphen), which means excessively humdrum. As, for example, Palm Springs.

I’ll point out that like ypsiliform and sinople, ultramontane could be a difficult word to define in context; while it always means the same thing, the given landmass or people being identified as ultramontane would depend entirely on who’s using the word. Essentially, this property of this word should prevent the bear from ever making his much-talked-about journey to the other side of the mountain. Relatively speaking, he would have already been there.

Friday, May 22, 2009

A quick follow-up to yesterday’s Hollister-related post: The name of my town would have been something else, if it wasn’t for a certain naysayer. According to Wikipedia, my hometown — originally founded as the San Justo Homestead Association, which took it name from Saint Justus, who attempted to convert the heathen Anglo-Saxons to Christianity in the seventh century — was initially going to be known as San Justo. Henry Hagen, a man described as a Napa vintner and a member of the homestead association, allegedly argued that California already had enough towns with Spanish saint names and that perhaps the city should honor “someone less holy.” That’s how Wikipedia puts it, anyway. Those on the name selection committee eventually found a namesake in William Welles Hollister, the famed state-crossing shepherd who founded Hollister before deciding to move on to Santa Barbara, where he died. The name San Justo still exists in various places throughout the county, maybe most prominently in the name of Rancho San Justo Middle School.

memorialized here if not in my town’s name

No idea if Wikipedia has this right, but I love that my hometown got its name on what sounds like a whim. “Oh, you don’t like this one? Then how about this thing we just came up with? It doesn’t sound all Spanish-y. And junk.”

Thursday, May 21, 2009

The longer it’s been since I actually lived in Hollister, the rarer the occasion arises that I think to share my favorite story about it. This story is not representative of my hometown in any way. I’ll say that again, since people often tend to think the opposite: This story is not representative of my hometown in any way.

The summer after my freshman year of college, I headed back home, worked at the newspaper, and watched the house while my parents were away on extended vacation. In all, not a bad way to spend three hot months. By virtue of having the place to myself, however, I had to shop for groceries on my own. I’d never felt more grown up. Sure, I had made grocery trips during the previous year, when I lived in the dorms, but shopping for food myself in my hometown at the store my mom shops at made me feel like an adult in ways that little from my first year of college did.

On one trip to the grocery store, I was standing in line and noticed two older women queued up behind me. I glanced back and saw that they were both around my grandmother’s age and could have very well been friends of my grandma’s, given how social circles work in Hollister. The two women were chatting back and forth with the usual call-and-response pairs that people so often exchange when they haven’t caught up in a while.

Then there was a lull.

Then this: “Did you hear about Pearl?”

(An admission: Though this story should be considered non-fiction, I can’t be sure that the woman being discussed was actually named Pearl. She could have just as easily been named Fern or Inez or Dotty or Mabel or Genuflessa or Eunice or anything else from the stable of names that women of this generation were saddled with. For the sake of telling this story, I’ll stick with Pearl.)

“No. What happened to Pearl?” the other one asked.

“She’s in the hospital. She’s been very sick!” the first woman responded.

“That’s awful! I hadn’t heard. What’s wrong?” said the second woman.

“Well, it started out with a clock she had bought at an antique store,” the first women began to explain. “And right after Pearl brought the clock into the house, she started getting sick. And they didn’t know what was wrong with her. They did tests and they gave her this and that and she didn’t get better. And so then it turned out that there was a ghost living in the clock that she had bought and the ghost was what was making Pearl sick.”

“You’re kidding!” replied the second woman, her voice indicating genuine astonishment — not at the fact that a ghost played a role in the story but that the root of the illness turned out to be a ghost. “So what did they do?”

The answer: “Oh, well, they got rid of the clock.”

I delight in the story for several reasons.

As far as I could tell at the time, no one else heard the story. I looked around to see if anyone’s face might contort in a way that indicated they too were trying to follow the story’s crazy logic, but I saw no such reactions.

I don’t know what kills me more: The first woman’s belief that (a) ghosts can make you sick at all, much less to the point that you would require hospitalization; (b) that ghosts haunt clocks; (c) that this whole mess could be solved by something as simple as throwing away the apparently cursed clock. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that the second woman didn’t seem to question one bit of that logic and instead received the haunted clock story much as she would have a story about Pearl falling and breaking her hip.

It didn’t help at all that I’d just previously profiled this women as people who could potentially be my grandmother’s friends. I actually thought about bringing the matter up with my grandmother — “Grandma, do you by any chance have a friend named Pearl who recently spent time in the hospital?” — but I never did, mostly out of fear that investigation would only reveal that I was the only person in town who didn’t think that ghosts made you sick.

Finally, there’s the matter of who the story’s “they” was and how this distinguished group determined that the source of the disease was the clock. It could be that I’ve abridged this part in my mind or it could have been that the woman telling the story never mentioned it. It seems important enough to the chain of events, however, that either I should have remembered it or she should have spelled it out. I really hope the “they” she spoke of actually referred to two groups: the medically professionals at the hospital and some separate group of crazy people who think ghosts live in clocks.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

I may not have much to show for my four-hour-drive today, but I’ll at least offer this: I may soon have to clarify between the words onanastic and onomastic, though I’ll admit that there exists enough wiggle room that either may prove to be appropriate.

Tragically, I may offer little else until I’m back in familiar environs.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Procrastination rewarded: I recently discovered a seemingly unimportant change between the English and Japanese versions of the video game Chrono Trigger that I find rather baffling. The game opens with the hero, Crono — that is, not Chrono or even Krono but Crono, sans an “H” — being awakened by his mother. As with every other character in the game, her every line begins with her name and a colon, screenplay style, to identify her as the one talking. In the U.S. version, she’s simply Mom. According to this site, however, the Japanese version assigns her a proper name, just as every other character in the game gets: Jina, which I suppose could have been rendered in English as Gina.

This minor character having a proper name helps to reinforce parallels between Chrono Trigger and it’s sequel, Chrono Cross. Both open with the main character waking up and being greeted by their respective mother. But unlike her counterpart in the American translation of Chrono Trigger, the mother in Chrono Cross has a name: Marge.

I wonder what impulse prompted whoever translated the first game for English-speaking audiences to simply call the mother Mom. Did they think American players wouldn’t get who this strange woman traipsing into a young man’s bedroom would be? Did they think we couldn’t wrap our heads around the notion of a mother having a name other than Mom? It’s an odd choice that presumably was made for some reason. Otherwise why make it?

Monday, May 18, 2009

The limerick contained therein, aside from admirably rhyming svelte and veldt, reminded me that I should put something up on this blog about Nigeria, the African nation whose name does not imply what my American ears think it might. In short, there does exist a Latin word niger that gives us several English words referring to the color black. However, most historians and linguists seem to think that the resemblance to this particular color word and the name of the river are mere coincidence.

A slightly more elaborate version: Wikipedia posits that the nation of Nigeria takes its name from a coinage by Flora Shaw, who for whatever reason saw fit to smash Niger into area. (Somehow, I’m guessing that Miss Shaw looked nothing like the girl in the Maidenform advertisement and probably never ventured into the jungle to hunt clip art tigers.) That Niger would be the Niger River, which runs through this particular nation. The river’s name is a rather complicated matter, etymologically. “What is clear is that Niger was an appellation applied in the Mediterranean world from at least the Classical era, when knowledge of the area by Europeans was slightly better than fable,” Wikipedia notes. depending on who is picking the name and where they’re considering the edges of mapped civilization, it could very well be true that, over time, a whole host of rivers were then considered to be the Niger — or Ni-Gir, in some texts, which was named in some attempt at contrast to another river known as the Gir. Theories abound as to where Niger/Ni-Gir came from, but a particularly attractive one lies in the Tuareg phrase gher n gheren, “river of rivers,” which may have referred to a river running near Timbuktu.

Regardless of whether the “actual” or “original” Niger River was, the point of this post is to disseminate the notion that its name has no etymological connection with the color black. I initially found this very strange, but upon considering it for a few moments, I realize that I had no business thinking this. First off, the river is fairly clear — not like those murky bodies of water whose low level of clarity earned them the label blackwater. Secondly, why should this one particular chunk of the African continent be labeled as being black? Why would the Nigerians refer to themselves as such? Wouldn’t they have looked around at neighboring lands as perceived themselves to be not dark-skinned people but, you know, just ordinary people who looked like most everyone else they saw on a daily basis? Africa’s history is often one of subjugation and interference by non-Africans, but it’s also the home of the oldest civilizations on the planet — places that easily predate the Indo-European language and its etymological legacy.

In presuming that Nigeria must more or less share a verbal root with the English word negro and its relatives, I was forcing a subconsciously forcing a language to play by my rules, looking at it only from an Anglocentric perspective — or at least a Romanocentric perspective.

I would chalk this up to my own ignorance, but I’m fairly certain I’m not the only English-speaker or even Romance language-speaker to glance over a map and assume that Nigeria refers to the color of its inhabitants’ skin. Hell, even those who know a thing or two about the history of African nations might have reason to think so, as Liberia, the name of another African nation that exists in fairly close proximity to Nigeria, comes from the Latin liber, meaning “free,” and was specifically named to honor of the freedom enjoyed by liberated American slaves. It’s a good lesson for the verbally minded — even if a given thing looks to be a certain way, it may not be — as well as for those who tend to cling to their native culture — even if a word means something in your language, it may been something wholly unrelated in someone else’s.

But now you know. Please recall this when next perusing a map of the world.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

I’d guess that for a lot of the people who watched last night’s Will Ferrell-hosted season finale of Saturday Night Live, the highlight might have been the last sketch, which featured Ferrell singing Billy Joel’s “Goodnight Saigon” along with the entire SNL cast, Tom Hanks, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Green Day, Norm Macdonald, Paul Rudd, Anne Hathaway, Elizabeth Moss, and, for some reason, Artie Lange. Others might have liked the “Celebrity Jeopardy!” reunion or the return of the Mayrelle Sisters. For me, however, the best part was the funeral sketch — which itself was a retread of a wedding toast sketch from the Hugh Laurie episode earlier this season.

The big difference between the original and this one is the out-of-nowhere appearance of Glenda Goodwin — a rather obscure Maya Rudolph character whose handful of appearances have, to my knowledge, never been reproduced in online videos and only one of which appears at SNL Transcripts.

Toward the end of last night’s funeral sketch, Glenda appears — carrying her own microphone — and salutes the dead guy, amazingly, by singing about sasquatches to the tune of “Amazing Grace.”

For the record, those lyrics are as follows:

Amazing sasquatchYour powers are manyYou walk through the woodsAnd get photographedYou don’t need a coatBut you do need a combBecause your bodyIs basically a beard

And then in the second verse, she asks for directions to nachos.

I have no idea why Glenda Goodwin was given a chance to return, but I’m guessing it’s just a coincidence that the character’s first appearance referenced Land of the Lost, the remake of which Will Ferrell was plugging in his hosting gig. The first Glenda Goodwin sketch was a commercial for her legal services, in which she promised to defend clients in cases involving paranormal circumstances such as invisible robots, werewolves, Tyrannosaurus rexes, paintings with moving eyeballs, and the Sleestaks from the original Land of the Lost.

Glenda Goodwin wonderment aside, the wedding toast sketch was better, mostly because Kristen Wiig’s delivery of its final line — “There’s a body in bathroom!” — is unbeatable.

Saturday, May 16, 2009

No fireworks this week, just an honest-to-god useful word that I only recently learned about.

tyro (TIE-row) — noun: a novice; someone just beginning to learn a given thing.

Has anyone else managed to get this far in their life without encountering this word? I feel like tyro must have avoided me. Here’s why: When reading, I tend to skip over strange multisyllabic monstrosities but will often take the time to look up shorter that words that I don’t know, the possible underlying logic being that many of the words we English speakers use most often are shorter and that, just maybe, this new, short word has a better chance of working its way into my regular vocabulary than, for example, aequeosalinocalcalinoceraceoaluminosocupreovitriolic.

Straightforward though tyro might be, it’s a head-scratcher etymologically. The hand-dandy Online Etymological Dictionary traces its history as an English word back to the Middle Latin tiro, “young soldier, recruit, beginner.” The trail seems to end there. So, basically, the word hasn’t changed much since we started paying attention to it, but despite that constancy no one’s sure how it came to be. Of course, it may well have skipped around like most other words — we just don’t have any record of it doing so.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

The latest incarnation of what appears to be a Back of the Cereal Box trend, at least based on this post and this post: crazy women and their animals.

And it’s a threefer.

Today, I offer a wealthy woman, name lost in the sands of time, and her retinue, which includes one human man, two jowly dogs, and a monkey dressed in a nightgown who happens to be the only one of the five with the sense to look at the camera.

Also: A terrified-looking Brooke Astor and her angry-looking dachshund, who, despite an expression of focused concern, apparently couldn’t prevent the elder abuse that plagued his owner’s later years

And also also: Birds star Tippi Hedren posing in a pose that I can only hope was re-created years later with Linda Hamilton and a humanoid, cigarette-lighting robot.